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Howdy, SEOmoz fans! In today's video, we'll explore the nifty, nefarious world on Agile Marketing, which I talked about at MozCon a few weeks ago. We'll take a look at four key principles of Agile Marketing and talk about how you can use them to hack your organization to deliver more value to your customers more often by breaking down barriers and removing impediments to your progress.

The strengths of Agile are that it focuses on bringing customers into our marketing and development efforts; it focuses on interaction with your colleagues by building cross-functional teams; it pushes us to always stay in motion by prioritizing delivery to our users and customers above all other concerns; and it follows a strong, iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" cycle, just like Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup.

You know how fast things change in the world of SEO and inbound marketing - Google published 52 changes to their algorithm last April and another 39 changes in May. Agile methodologies can help you respond and react to those changes so that you can stay on top of new opportunities.

Enjoy, and I'd love to see your comments below! I'll be jumping in to answer your questions as they come up.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jonathon Colman from REI, and today we're going to be talking about agile marketing. This is a discipline that we are picking up from software developers, who have been practicing agile for decades, and we're applying it to our discipline of marketing and we're doing that for a couple of really good reasons.

First of all, agile helps us focus on our users and create more value for them more often, in ways that make sense, and it also helps us, as an organization, adapt to change. And you know better than anyone, how much change there is. Google's releasing algorithm updates, 52 of them last May, 29 right after that. There's Panda, there's Penguin, all of the news and tips and tricks we see on Inbound.org.

We are constantly taking in new information to our organizations. But, oftentimes, our organizations aren't able to respond to them. And why is that? Because they're structured like this, because they're structured in a big hierarchy that's not centered around the user. So even when they take in new information, they can't apply it directly to the people who matter most, their customers.

Secondly, we tend to work in models like this, which is a waterfall development model, where we take in requirements at the beginning, and then we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and so on. But if change is coming down the road, if something happens here, like a Penguin, we can't respond to that because that's six months later. And, as you know, SEO, inbound marketing, social media, that's changing hourly, not in six-month or one-year cycles. So we have to become better at changing, and that's what agile helps us do.

So let's talk about four principles of agile and a couple hacks that we can use to change our organizations.

First of all come customers. They're the most important people. They're our reason for existing as a business. So we like to say, "Users are number one." "We're number one!" So what we do is we structure our work and ourselves all around the user. And one great way of doing that, here's a hack you can use, is to develop user stories. So as you're doing research with your users, as you're collaborating with them and sort of bringing them into the business to find out what they need to succeed in their goals, you'll start building these out. And they have a really simple formula.

As a user or buyer or shopper or, in our case, maybe something like backpacker, I want whatever is that they have as a goal. Perhaps I want to be able to find the lightest weight backpacking products so that they can succeed. So this would be so that I can have a great time in an outdoor adventure, hiking the Adirondacks. And what this helps us do, what user stories are so good at is keeping us focused on that increment of work that we need to do so that our customers can succeed. So this is a great way of doing light and quick documentation to help us fulfill user goals.

The next principle we're going to talk about is cross-functional teams, and that's where we really blow away this hierarchy from the old-school business days. What we do is we take all those institutional silos and we just reduce them to rubble, and we form this sort of cross-functional team, where content design, code, inbound marketing, data or analytics, project management, we all sit together, all in the same place, work together on the same thing at the same time. No one is ever gone. You don't have to walk to another building or send a long e-mail to explain something. We cut down on documentation, on all those pesky e-mails and IM's, and we actually have person-to-person interactions. It's a real strength of agile.

So I have a couple tools to help you with that. First is the stand-up meeting. This is one of the few meetings you have in agile marketing, and if it takes longer than 10 minutes, something has gone wrong. Imagine just having one meeting of just 10 minutes, 10 minutes, once a day, and then being able to focus on real work that creates value for users. It's awesome.

So here's how the stand-up meeting works. Everyone gathers around, you stand up, and that helps keep it short, and you talk about first what you did, then what you're doing, and then anything that might be blocking your progress. We'll talk about how to deal with problems like that in just a second. Some tools that can help you out with that, if you visit Trello.com. They're an online collaboration tool. Distilled used them as part of their creation of DistilledU, which is an awesome tool. And then the Meeting Cost Calculator, which you can get at bit.ly/meetcost, and you can also click in these links below us here.

So next, we have the principle of having a bias toward action, and really this is very simple. Doing is always going to be greater than not doing. So when we deal with problems like analysis paralysis, when we have problems like a politician who has the power to say yes or no, and here's my favorite, when someone comes up to you and says, "It sounds like a good idea, but we just don't do it that way," agile helps us break that down, because we always go back to our user story and we say, "Well, this is something the customer needs."

So what we do is we negotiate to "Yes." What we do is, we find that ground that allows us to proceed with our work. There's actually a role in agile that does nothing besides remove impediments to your work. So doing is always greater than not doing. And another hack that you can use is to just say no, because once you have your set of user stories developed, if someone comes around and tries to give you extra work or tries to say, "Well, you need to do this, and this, and this," which happens quite a lot, the old, "Yeah, I'm going to need you to have to come in on Saturday and, yeah, maybe on Sunday too," that doesn't create value for the customer right now. What we have to do is get this prioritize user story out the door as quickly as possible. So we want to maximize the amount of work that we do not do by just saying no.

And our last principle is to "Don't Hate, Iterate." I'm stealing this from a colleague at REI. It's just a great phrase. When we don't release on a six-month or a one-year cycle, when we're releasing every two weeks or every four weeks, we fall into Eric Ries' "Build, Measure, Learn" model here, where we develop our products or we do our marketing campaign, we get it out the door, we launch it, and then we see how it works for customers. We have this measurement phase. We see how it performs, and you know what, if it's not up to snuff, that's okay. It's all right. We learn. And then, two weeks later, we release a fix. When we do an iteration, we do something better that customers are going to respond to. And if that doesn't work either, that's okay. We go through the cycle again until we get closer and closer to what the customer needs to succeed in their goals.

And that leads to our final principle, which is "You're Not Perfect." I'm not perfect. Rand Fishkin is not perfect. He's pretty good, but he's not perfect. And that's okay. We don't want to be perfect, because perfect, chasing perfection holds us up in our work to get something out the door to customers. We don't want that. We want to always be delivering, always be shipping to customers as fast and as quickly as we can. So you shouldn't chasing the A+. You should be chasing what's going to be valuable for your users. Go back to your user story. That's what you need to succeed at. And if you don't get there, it's okay because two weeks later, you'll have another chance.

So, I talked about this at MozCon, and you can download my presentation at bit.ly/agilewins. There's also a link below. Please comment on the story. I'll come in and try to answer your questions and direct you to more resources.

Love someone breaking down Agile Marketing and how it is important to not think of terms of content, SEO, and other things unless they are valuable to the customer. It is becoming more important everyday to make sure that the activities being done are providing value to your customers or clients by thinking about the tactics to implement in any form of marketing or industry.

"Don't Hate, Iterate" is definitely my favorite takeaway from this. I find a lot of people spend time dissing on different elements of the industry and other things. It is important to adapt as opposed to worrying about how the past was better.

The whole WBF reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I have pinned up at my desk, “In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and
improvise most effectively have prevailed” - Charles Darwin.

Evolution is key in the inbound marketing industry and it is important to recognize change and adapt to it and make it work for you. Thanks again for a wonderful Whiteboard Friday Jonathon!

And yeah, I think you're right: haters gonna hate, but as SEOs and agile marketers, we need to rise above the burden of history and the entropy of negativity to keep adapting and evolving along with our customers. Nothing brings us down or puts a barrier in our way so much as inflexibility and an unwillingness to change.

But we know know our customers are changing right now and our industry is clearly in disruption (oh hai, Panda and Penguin), so if we can't change ourselves and the ways in which we work, our customers are going to move on... without us!

Hey Jonathan! I love seeing your presentations, both online and IRL. This is a great rundown on agile and it definitely gave me a more comprehensive understanding of the philosophy than I had before. I absolutely love the idea of being user-centric and having the opportunity to work in short iteration cycles so you can always be shipping.

My question is, how could agile marketing be applied in a consulting agency setting? At SwellPath, we partner with clients and their dev teams to improve SEO, user experience, conversion rates, etc. The problem I'm seeing is two-fold. One, we aren't really in front of the client like an in-house would be and that makes it much harder to define user stories. Two, we typically have absolutely no say in what the development cycle for the site looks like. I think you could still do an okay job of defining a "pretty good" user story as an outside consultant, but how could you go about getting a client and their developer on a shorter iteration cycle? I feel like having the chance to iterate and constantly be shipping changes would be immensely beneficial.

It's pretty hard to re-shape the processes of an external organization from the outside unless they're willing to change and bring you on for the purpose of guiding them through that process.

But that's OK - you can drive change at SwellPath and begin the process of transforming your cultural, workflows, and processes to become Agile in your own work, both in development and marketing. What will help the most with that is having a senior-level or executive sponsor who hold themselves (and you!) accountable for moving in this direction. If you can plant the Agile seed in that person's head -- Inception-style! -- then you've already done most of the hard work already!

From an agency or consultant perspective, part of our role is to manage them to accomplish and execute the strategy that we create or provide. What good is a 100 page doc if an end user is not benefitted right?

Having said that, we can manage clients in an agile format without having to change how they do things. New processes often take time to implement and adopt, but if they view it as you just getting stuff done - then its a win for the customers :)

Great WBF Jonathon. I'm trying to implement the Agile Methodology in the way we work with our clients.

I've found out that the most practical way to work Agile into our SEO services, is to have us spending at least 2 days a week in their offices.

This way we can definitively have face to face interaction and build cross-functional teams that integrate not only our people but people from the client's side.

For instance, we provide a community manager, a SEO consultant and a paid search expert and we work hand in hand with one of their dev, IA or UX person.

It even allows us to bring one of our own Dev or designer if needed. Basically we can be very flexible and scalable.

It does also change the way you will bill the clients as with this model I don't believe having a fixed monthly fee works because every iteration might involve more or less man-day than the previous one. Do you have any suggestions about this?

Wow, I love the way that you're embracing Agile and focusing on engagement and person-to-person interactions with your agency, but I can see how cost and billing models also need to be updated to support this extra investment.

I want to turn that part of your comment back to the community: how do you charge for agile marketing/development?

Well done, Jonathon. How do you feel about marketing teams being involved during the product development or product iteration phase? It seems like if a company was committed to the agile marketing process, they'd also want their marketing folks involved at the very beginning of the product dev process.

I think that's the next big step toward building an integrated organization. Agile usually starts in technical teams; now there's recognition of the value that it can provide for marketers. From there, as you point out, the Agile virus can infect other parts of the organization, such as product development.

WOW Jonathon! Love this whiteboard Friday! Especially the cross
functional team because usually in my personal opinion what takes you behind is
the time that spent on communications and emails… like you send an email to you
the PM and now you have to wait for two days for the PM to respond and then
move on to the next… this eats lot of time..

Sitting together working on the same thing at the same time
will reduce or totally cut down the time of writing emails and communication
and make everyone a responsible of the project in terms of success of failure.

Great WBF Jon! Your Mozcon presentation really inspired me to stop trying to make everything perfect and just get stuff done. The video is great for those couldn't see you at Mozcon and I recommend everyone check out your deck from the event.

What a treasure this is. I couldn't agree more that we have to be agile in adapting to the fast paced SEO change. We have got to keep up with these changes and this just became my favorite post. Thanks for sharing Jonathon!

Great WBF Jonathon. I love how Agile Marketing is centered on the users needs. Waterfall model is old school. Good things happen for businesses that center efforts around users needs. Have a an awesome weekend!

Funny you should mention Agile in marketing terms - I've only ever used Agile for software / web development. I've never thought about how it applies in terms of marketing. A very interesting take on it but it's essentially what most marketers (on or offline) should be doing anyway - call it Agile if you like. In the end it's just a name.

Great introduction to Agile Methodology for SEO, Jonathon!I have heard of Agile before but never ever had a chance to implement it. Now when you have dissected it and presented to us in a clear and understandable manner it's really easy to follow your advice and these 4 rules.I am thinking on how we can put it into practice in our company.My question to you: what about the weaknesses of Agile applied to SEO industry? are there any and if yes, how you deal with them? What problems have you encountered while practicing Agile methodology yourself? Thank you.

UPD: just sent an email about saving $$$ on meetings to our company owners, CEO, CTO and CFO (DOING > not doing).

*High-five* -- way to go, Slava! Let us know how that e-mail to your leadership works out.

Just like any other tool or process, Agile certainly has its weaknesses. Just to name a few that I've encountered in my experience:

Weakness in long-term planning: in the rush to ship NOW, it's easy to lose sight of long-term objectives and initiatives.

Weakness in sustainable architecture: a lot of agile teams end up re-creating the wheel several times over rather than building campaigns, tools, and features that endure.

Weakness in analyzing past efforts (successful or not) and improving on those metrics in the next release or iteration.

A lot of these can be solved with process customizations, start/pause/stop studies, and (usually) common sense. The goal is generally to learn from your mistakes and do better next time - not to try to get everything perfect right out of the gate.

Those weaknesses are just as inherent in waterfall (traditional, all the planning, all the development) type models. If anything, I would say that Agile is designed to /tackle/ those problems.

It's not about being /quick/, it's about being able to measure, react and change. If there is a rush to ship /now/, you're not learning anything and you're reinventing the wheel then you're just hacking things together quickly, not doing Agile.

Thats more the weakness of 'agile' development as opposed to 'Agile'. People seldom do it properly, and when you don't, it's probably worse then the older models.

Thanks Jonathon, this WBF is exactly what I needed to hear right now! As a whole, I would say that SEO's/Inbound marketers are overachievers. We all want to provide a tremendous amount of value to our customers and we all want to look/act perfect in every deliverable that we offer in a short amount of time. This is not possible! Adapting agile marketing will certainly help the SEO community realize that with the ever evolving sphere of changes in the inbound game that we just need to try to do our best with our cross-functional teams and realize that perfection is not possible.

Spot-frakking-on and I couldn't agree more. It wasn't until I released myself from the fear of not being perfect that I started getting really big and important work done.
Just do your best - that's all anyone can ask of you (including yourself).

Great post Jonathon. Its going to be interesting to integrate this into our team(s). We have developed an internal Project Management application, Tasklite for productivity but this adds a whole new layer of thinking to the current model.
We're currenty working with two external teams (both web design firms that outsource SEO to us) and I'd be interested to hear how you think Agile Marketing could best be implimented here. Thanks in advance!

Wow, tasklite looks great - thanks for sharing this; I hadn't seen it before.

As for working with team members at a distance, this came up during MozCon as well. I recommend Google Hangouts, which I use a lot for graduate school; they're free, high-quality, and allow for the sharing of screens, group editing of Google Docs, etc. I've found them to be highly effective for distributed teams. Hope that helps, Lucas!

Spot-on -- so imagine how it can improve marketing teams! We've had a couple decades of learning from Agile software development, so marketers should be able to adapt those processes to quickly and in ways that make sense for their organizations.

So let me start by saying I am only just starting to introduce agile to the marketing team - you could say we are at ground zero week 1 (and a half). I really should write a diary about all of this, I and the team we are going to stumble in our adoption and likely we will be flying blind trying to understand and interpret the best steps for us to take next but anyway...we have started maybe not the right place (?) but we have started, and started it together.

Super simple stuff to begin with, a backlog and a task-board. The backlog is just a wall in the office space covered in Post-It Notes, it is slightly out of view from the team because I didn't want them to see the volume we can't do every minute of the day. Basically the backlog is just a huge wall with about 30-40 notes on and that's it. Our task board is just a white board, in plain view during the day. The task board has four columns; 'to-do, 'in-progress', 'in review' and 'done'. Every week (Monday morning) we have a stand-up meeting at the backlog, we pull off the items we can achieve in the week and then take them to the task-board. Every day we stand at the task-board and talk about what we did, what we need to do and any roadblocks, for a team of 5 we stand there for about 10 minutes. Our notes flutter across the board into the 'done' column and hopefully by Friday we are moving the last few things into the 'done' pile. Instantly we have noticed people are focussing on what needs to be done rather than looking at the hump of what can't be done, a huge win for us right now.

I know this is more about adopting some tools and process rather than principles but I wanted to take a small chunk out of this journey and I felt we could grasp (and grapple) this stuff the easiest first without needing to sauddenly scare people around us with new thinking and ideals! There are loads for us to think about and I really need to come up with some sort of adoption plan but right now I wwant to get little bits working and let it settle before I think too far ahead.

Really enjoyed this WBF Jonathon. The cross functional teams that you reference appear to be very beneficial in my eyes. However, I can picture a lot of push back from managers of individual silos. How have you found proposing and implementing these changes? Is it difficult to get buy off from leaders?

It's difficult and often requires senior executive sponsorship as well as shared goals between the silos. But when you think about it, that's what a good business should be doing, anyway: incentivizing a total, coordinated, positive customer experience... not just a click in Google.

Getting execs to agree takes a lot of storytelling with strong focus on the benefits: better customer relationships, strong teams, quicker releases, iterations to catch errors, etc. But ultimately there needs to be a culture of transparency and risk-taking at the company in order for it to truly succeed.

Superb presentation Jonathon.Your tips are really helpful as this
article has the great idea of marketing and contains the superb
motivational words. I was aware of term Agile Marketing and so when
readied the title i thought WBF is going to be interesting and as
expected the video is a pure thrill. I don't thinks so that i have more
words to appreciate more this great stuff.But still want to say thanks
for sharing such a great methodologies.

Terrific WBF. This is an Enterprise SEOer's dream, although for established companies may be a tad difficult to implement. Creating cross-functional teams would be a wonderful thing to have, but with larger companies, having everyone onboard with a seemingly "alien" concept might be easier said than done. I agree with your comment that the goal of your business should be to provide a "total, coordinated, positive customer experience," but changing a system that has worked (not amazingly, but well) for years is another story.

That being said, this is without a doubt a very effective plan! Crossing my fingers that we can come up with something near it.

Very interesting. I have never heard of Agile Marketing (of course I am just getting into the SEO "world")

I think a lot of us got banged over the head so much with content is king we took the focus off the actual user and put the focus on content we THOUGHT the user needs.

It seems like if you don't have an efficient system in place like this Agile Marketing you will always be chasing on the back end of Google's newest Algorithms. I admit I have had some experience with this....

But if you ensure that user is king, how much do you actually have to worry about Google algorithms? ( I do know too much worrying about it will get you no where!)

Since this video was released, I've made a real effort to make us more "agile" as an agency. It's certainly been beneficial for our clients. I'd particularly recommend Trello for anyone to use for their project management. Having clients their own board with separate lists (such as "In Progress" Deliverables etc) gives a free flowing iterative approach to getting stuff done. This video has been invaluable for inspiring us to make ourselves more "agile".

Really great whiteboard ! I especially liked your model because it incorporates the user experience necessity based on the assumption that the crew are not just web savvy but more importantly in today's climate, equally marketing /consumer behaviour aware. Great work !

"Doing > Not Doing", I really dig this. I've had Bre Pettis' Done Manifesto at my desk for years, but getting everyone on board with the idea of "let's get this out and see what it does so we can learn from it" has been a hard sell. Of course, the way to address this is to make everyone aware that we can iterate quickly should anything turn out to be sub-optimal.

Great WBF Jonathan! I love the emphasis on breaking down walls between teams and working together.

We have been doing this lately in my workplace, but my question for you is how would you do this more effectively with other businesses like retail industries that have 40-50 stores in one state? How would we be able to breakdown the store barriers to act more like one team state-wide?

Hey Nick, this really gets at the sort of cross-channel customer experience work I talked about a bit recently on John Doherty's blog. And it's a lot harder than traditional online-only marketing. Sounds like you're already grappling with these challenges, so cheers to you for being a pioneer!

Among other things, online/offline teams engaged in this work require shared goals so that they place the customer first and don't work against each other. In order to construct those, your online folks need to be incented to drive offline traffic and sales just as your store teams need to be incented to drive online activity. This shift in perspective to focus on the complete customer journey is hard to build without executive sponsorship and aligned teams, but I think -- and your customers -- will enjoy the results. :)

Wow. You could write a whole book about that. Still a video is better. Don't hate, iterate, is what differentiates digital marketing. The speed is so fast that the focus is not getting it right, it's learning (and then getting it right). Congrats.

Bringing customers into the development or marketing processes is the best way to learn about their needs and document user stories. You can do this through in-person testing or interviews, but also through surveys and going through "contact us"/"send feedback" or Get Satisfaction logs.

Here's a hack: Talk to the folks at your organization's Call Center or the Reception desk and do a formal "intake" of their experiences. They're often on the front lines for where your customers experience pain points on their journey with you and your company. These folks are great sources of knowledge for how your organization can improve to better serve your customers and users.

For REI, regarding that two week marketing cycle (sprint), could you provide a recent real-life example of a marketing "failure" that you then "learned" from and turned the next sprint into a "success"?

Also, do you constantly get kicked back on your ass with marketing campaign duds or are you playing with a snowball that keeps growing?

In the video (and in my MozCon presentation), I really emphasize the whole "don't be perfect" aspect of working in Agile. And that's for a great reason: I'm not. And can't be! Anyone who tells you different is selling something. :)

I personally failed at a number of initiatives during sprint cycles, everything from research to implementation standards to QA/QC to analytics to a pretty well-known case where I got our development strategy for canonicalization/pagination absolutely wrong.

But in each case, we iterated. We figured out what was wrong, went back to the project, and adjusted our execution. In the case of canonicalization/pagination, we re-read the research and followed best practices. Later on, we were able to implement rel=next/prev, which solved the problem entirely.

So another benefit of Agile is that when you place more focus on customer issues and feedback, it teaches you to be pretty humble. We're not rock stars or ninjas or space pirates... we're servants.

Glad you mentioned Eric Reis in this as that is exactly what it reminded me of, The Lean Startup as well as some principles that Tim Ferriss discussed in his book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Keeping a lean approach and being able to adjust your strategy at the drop of a hat is essential in this industry and I think it is something that we as a community have become very good at over the years. SEOmoz has proven a major resource for this, creating a hub for keeping up to date on recent algorithm changes and discussing tactics and strategies to reform our inbound approach as a community.

Love to hear this mentality spread and be put so plainly as you have done. Good stuff!

HOLA first of all I like to say for me, this is one of the bestest white board firday as a Guest. The way you defined is just awesome Jonathon Colman will see you more in WBF for sure. Now yeah you were 101% right think what your customer think, if you are able to do this you will win the race otherwise your work is just a work nothing else but if you want some success you have to be agile … Thanks for your thoughts Jonathon~